Into the Wilderness: The Jesse Hughes Story (1750 - 1829)

Born in the wilderness of northwestern Virginia in 1750, Jesse Hughes became a frontiersman who defended the early settlers in over one hundred skirmishes and battles and is credited for saving thousands of settlers by early warnings of Shawnee warriors on murder raids. Before the end of the French and Indian War (1754 – 1762), the French paid Native Americans to kill European and Colonial settlers in North America. After the British, Colonists, and their Native American allies defeated the French, North America became relatively safer. However, a few years later, the British started paying the Native Americans to kill the European and Colonial settlers in northwestern Virginia. During the French and Indian War, the Hughes family settled and cleared a wilderness farm. With each spring, the Shawnee came from Ohio on murder raids into northwestern Virginia. When Jesse Hughes was twelve years old in 1762, he witnessed his youngest brother being tomahawked and scalped. After witnessing his brother’s horrible murder, Jesse left farming and developed skills as a shrewd, frontier woodsman. Becoming larger than life in his own time, Jesse developed a reputation and fearsome eminence that no Shawnee ever ventured onto Jesse’s land near Weston and Ravenswood, Virginia (Now WV). Although farms and forts were often destroyed by hundreds of raiding Shawnee, Jesse’s cabin and land was avoided by all Shawnee; even those on murder raids. This manuscript chronicles fifty-five of the events that created the legend of Jesse Hughes among the settlers of northwestern Virginia and the Shawnee of Ohio. Folklore has been eliminated and only the facts as recorded in fort records and other government accounts of frontier events will be cited here.